Jon Shemitz - Publications

I've written a lot about programming over the years - my .NET book is just the most prominent recent example. People sometimes ask why I keep writing, especially when programming pays so much better. I usually say something about advertising, because that's the best short answer, but there are several good reasons to write. For example, it does tickle my vanity to be published, and I do like to feel like I'm paying forward for all the technology I take for granted. But as my pieces got longer and deeper, I found rewards that take more than a glib sound bite to explain.

"I write to find out what I think" - it's one thing to use a technique, it's quite another to explain it. Most of my Delphi and Turbo Pascal magazine articles focus on some technique that I used in a program or three and thought might be generally interesting. Having to explain things in a linear sequence and to write clean, stand-alone sample code means that I have to ground things in first principles, not the ad hoc accidents of the way I happened upon them. Sometimes I find that I don't quite know what I'm talking about, and thus I learn a thing or two in the course of writing.

Writing solo books brought out an aspect of writing that I really hadn't appreciated before. Where programming is full of places where Good Enough is really all that's appropriate - code that will only be exercised once or twice a year, for example - in a book, everything's visible. That is, Good Enough really isn't good enough. There are always a few places where I have to just move on - but for the most part my .NET and Kylix books represents many man-months of the best that I can do. This is a great feeling ... I do expect that I will write a third book.

Finally, writing books keeps me current. I have to identify topics that a working programmer needs to know and will find difficult to learn, and then I have to learn them well enough to explain them clearly. This deep understanding lets me solve customers' problems quickly and efficiently, without charging for research and rewrites.